Companies may use a variety of methods to store data. For example, a company may have an information technology (IT) department that specializes in this area and purchases servers to store company data along with other IT equipment. Alternatively or additionally, the company may request the services of a third party to store data. The company may opt to store its data, for example, with the help of a cloud storage provider that offers data storage to multiple companies. This option may be cheaper for the company because it does not need to invest in servers and other IT equipment.
The company, however, may run into some disadvantages by using a third party to store data. For example, the third party may not allow the company to modify data in the database. To overcome this problem, the company may copy all of the data from the third party's database to another database, and then modify this other database. This approach, however, is inefficient and time consuming. Moreover, some data storage providers do not allow clients to transfer all of their data out of their domain.